Cairo

Defendant John Skillern. Webster Police A 41-year-old Houston man was arrested on suspicion of child pornography charges in an investigation founded on a tip that Google sent to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children.

"They got a tip, basically Gmail," detective David Nettles of the Houston Metro Internet Crimes Against Children Task Force told a local news broadcast last week.

The defendant, John Skillern, was being held on $200,000 bond and is a registered sex offender connected to a 20-year-old sexual assault on a young boy.

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Microsoft is continuing to churn out regular updates to its developer tools with the release today of Visual Studio 2013 Update 3. As with previous updates, the release includes as mix of bug fixes and new capabilities.

New features include expanding the memory usage profiler to support both .NET applications using WPF and native code applications using Win32, CodeLens support for git repositories so work items and change history can be shown integrated in the text editor, and a better debugging experience for Windows Store apps on multimonitor systems.

Other parts of Microsoft's developer ecosystem were also updated today. The Windows Phone 8.1 Update preview is now available on all phones enrolled in the developer preview program, and the developer emulator images have been updated accordingly.

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Aereo

In an emergency motion (PDF) filed Friday, TV-over-Internet startup Aereo submitted its most detailed legal arguments yet as to why it should be allowed to be a cable company. It also asked, based on those arguments, to resume operations until a final decision was reached.

US District Judge Alison Nathan wasn't having it, though. She rejected (PDF) the emergency motion and ordered it stricken from the record the same day it was filed. "Defendant has jumped the gun in filing, without authorization, its motion," she wrote. Instead, she ordered both sides to file papers in support of their positions following the Supreme Court case over the next five weeks.

Aereo was shut down a few days after it lost its Supreme Court case on a 6-3 vote. The Supreme Court said Aereo's strategy of using tiny antennas to push over-the-air TV over the Internet looked too much like a cable company to avoid paying copyright royalties.

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A scene from Tropico 5, deemed inappropriate for sale in Thailand by the ruling junta.

Publisher Kalypso Media has confirmed that Thailand's Board of Film and Video Censors office has blocked the local release of Tropico 5, which features gameplay scenarios that may be too close to the real-world military coup that hit the country in May.

In its announcement, Kalypso notes that the Ministry of Culture declared merely that "some contents of the game are not appropriate for the current situation" in the country. However, a spokesperson for Thai distributor New Era told the AP that the government was worried that "some part of [the game's] content might affect peace and order in the country." Prior to the coup, both Tropico 3 and Tropico 4 were released in Thailand without incident.

Since it launched in 2001, the Tropico series has let players take the role of "El Presidente" and rule an island nation with an iron fist or a gentle, tourist-friendly hand. As Kalypso noted in a statement, the gameplay in the "Junta" expansion pack for previous release Tropico 4 largely mimics the militaristic takeover the country experienced earlier this year. "This [ban] does sound like it could have come from one of El Presidente’s own edicts from the game," Kalypso Media Group Global Managing Director Stefan Marcinek said in a statement.

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Professional-networking site LinkedIn is agreeing to pay nearly $3.35 million in unpaid overtime to 359 workers, in addition to $2.5 million in damages under a deal announced Monday with the US Department of Labor.

The accord covers current and former employees at LinkedIn offices in California, Illinois, Nebraska, and New York.

"This company has shown a great deal of integrity by fully cooperating with investigators and stepping up to the plate without hesitation to help make workers whole," David Weil, administrator of the Wage and Hour Division, said in a statement.

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New measurements of the star system HK Tauri provide insight into the complicated environments that can govern the formation of exoplanets. Before scientists had the ability to study exosolar systems in detail, it was expected that other systems would look a lot like ours. The planets of our Solar System orbit in a plane that roughly corresponds to the Sun’s equator, occupying nearly circular orbits.

However, when exoplanets began to be discovered, that expectation of familiarity was shattered. Exoplanetary systems occupy all kinds of orbits, with inclination varying wildly. There is currently no consensus about what causes these planetary orbits to get so out of whack.

Planets form out of a disk of gas and dust, part of the same material that formed the star. Since the whole system, including the star, was essentially one spinning disk at one point in its evolution, planets should orbit roughly along the same plane as their host star’s equator. After all, that is what we observe in our own Solar System. But in exosolar systems, that’s not always the case.

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A look at the freshly redesigned Apple TV UI, taken from the latest developer beta. 9to5Mac

Apple reportedly seeded another beta of iOS 8 to developers today, and it came with a little something special for Apple TV users. 9to5Mac reports that the latest beta brings a refreshed user interface to the Apple TV, replacing the old iOS 6-style UI with a flatter look, updated icons, and refreshed fonts that bring it in line with iOS 7 and the forthcoming OS X Yosemite. Previous betas, while still based on iOS 8, used a version of the current interface.

We won't know until the official release whether iOS 8 will change anything about the way the Apple TV works, but judging from the available screenshots, endless tapping and clicking of your remote will still be the primary method of navigation. Those hoping for some kind of Siri-powered voice control will have to keep waiting, either for new hardware with an embedded microphone or for an update to the Remote app for iOS devices (to name just two of the possible ways Apple could implement this feature).

The current-generation Apple TV boxes introduced back in March of 2012 will presumably get this update alongside iPhones and iPads when iOS 8 launches in the fall. As we've already reported, second-generation Apple TV boxes will not receive this update—Apple is dropping support for all devices that use its A4 chip, including that box and the iPhone 4. A new Apple TV box is still in a state of flux. The Information reports that we could see a new version of the $99 Apple TV at some point this year, but a more extensive revamp that includes live TV broadcasts and buy-in from cable companies is being held up by negotiations.

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The Xbox One definitely puts the "box" in Xbox—it has none of the contours or curves of the various 360 models. Kyle Orland

It's been only a couple of months since Microsoft finally lowered the price of a (Kinect-free) Xbox One to $399. Now, it seems Microsoft is prepared to add to the value of that console by offering one of two free games bundled with the hardware in the near future.

The first bundle, officially announced today "in limited supply only," will package an Xbox One console with a copy of Madden NFL 15 and will be available "at select US retailers such as Microsoft retail stores" starting August 26, when the game comes out. In addition to special packaging, bundle purchasers will also get a download code for three NFL Ultimate Team packs. The bundle follows the announcement of EA's Xbox One-exclusive subscription service, EA Access, which offers early access to demo versions of many upcoming games, including Madden NFL 15.

The second bundle is not officially confirmed yet, but a Microsoft spokesperson told Polygon that the company will be offering an Xbox One bundled with exclusive zombie action title Sunset Overdrive. That bundle will supposedly be the first time the general public has access to a white Xbox One, which was previously only available to Microsoft employees who worked on the system before launch.

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The Union Street Guest House's imagemap homepage. Union Street Guest House

Apparently recognizing that restaurants and hotels can live and die by their online ratings, the Union Street Guest House in Hudson, NY included a table-turning clause in their reservation policies: if you book an event at the hotel and a member of your party posts a negative review, the hotel will fine you $500.

As initially reported by Page Six News, the Events and Weddings page on the hotel’s website contained the following language:

If you have booked the Inn for a wedding or other type of event anywhere in the region and given us a deposit of any kind for guests to stay at USGH, there will be a $500 fine that will be deducted from your deposit for every negative review of USGH placed on any Internet site by anyone in your party and/or attending your wedding or event. If you stay here to attend a wedding anywhere in the area and leave us a negative review on any Internet site, you agree to a $500 fine for each negative review.

It’s unclear when the decidedly anti-customer clause was added to the website (which appears to be as creaky and ancient as the hotel itself apparently is), but the story blew up this morning when Page Six News published a report on the clause. The story was echoed by BGR and Yahoo News before finally landing on the front page of reddit.

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Kim Heung-kwang (second from left) is a former North Korean cyberwarfare professor and a judge at the HRF event. Justice Suh (third from right) was one of the winning team members. Cyrus Farivar

SAN FRANCISCO—A three-person Korean-American team—including two 17-year-old college students—won a weekend-long hackathon sponsored by the Human Rights Foundation (HRF) designed to help people in North Korea.

The team's idea, which hasn’t moved beyond the concept phase, was deceptively simple: import a bunch of satellite receivers into North Korea so that people can simply receive TV stations from SkyLife, a major South Korean broadcaster.

At present, SkyLife’s satellite footprint easily extends into North Korea, and it includes many Korean-language stations including KBS and SBS, two of the largest. It also includes some English-language programming, including BBC, Eurosport, and Animal Planet, among others. The team realizes that getting a little more independent information into North Korea won't create an overnight revolution in the country. But under this plan, the team claims, North Koreans could start to learn more about how their South Korea cousins live via news, sports, entertainment, and more.

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Ross Ulbricht, as seen here in an undated photo, is the alleged mastermind of the Silk Road underground drug bazaar. FreeRoss.org

Alleged Silk Road founder Ross Ulbricht’s defense attorney Joshua Dratel has asked the court to suppress nearly all of the evidence collected against his client. Should the motion be successful, it would likely put a substantial damper on the government’s efforts to prosecute Ulbricht.

Dratel previously asked the court to dismiss all four criminal counts against his client. However, in a scathing opinion and order issued last month, the judge dismissed all of Dratel’s arguments. If this new motion doesn’t stick—absent a plea deal—the case will go to trial scheduled for November in a New York federal courtroom.

The underground drug website Silk Road was shut down as part of a federal raid late last year. It was only accessible through the anonymizing tool Tor and required payment in Bitcoin. The government claims that Ross Ulbricht, as Dread Pirate Roberts, "reaped commissions worth tens of millions of dollars” through his role as the site’s leader.

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The Ebola virus consists of small but lethal filament of RNA containing only seven genes. CDC

CNN reported Monday that the two US citizens who were flown back to the states after contracting the Ebola virus were given an extremely experimental treatment, one that's still undergoing animal testing. While the treatment involves antibodies, it's not a vaccine, and it can work effectively even after an infection has started. The process that produced it is a testament to the impressive capabilities developed in the field of biotechnology.

The Ebola virus, known for its horrific symptoms and high fatality rate, currently has no established treatment. The health care workers who are fighting the disease—and are thus at high risk for becoming infected themselves—can do little more than put themselves in isolation and try to compensate for the damage the virus causes. That situation was apparently the case for two Americans who contracted the virus while working in Liberia.

In this case, however, both people were apparently given an experimental treatment developed in part by a company called Mapp Biopharmaceutical. Complicating matters, Mapp licenses its developments to a company called LeafBio for production and distribution. But LeafBio has also licensed an Ebola treatment from a second company, called Defyrus, and it plans on combining the two. It's unclear whether the Americans received the original or combined therapy. In either case, both therapies were based on the same developmental process outlined below.

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Low-income families get cheap Internet access from Comcast. Flickr user: Karen Bryan

After complaints about a program that offers cheap Internet service to poor people, Comcast today announced it will provide "up to six months" of free Internet to new subscribers and an "amnesty" program for families with unpaid bills.

Comcast's Internet Essentials, mandated by the federal government when Comcast acquired NBCUniversal, gives $10-per-month Internet service to low-income households with schoolchildren. Critics have argued that the program is too hard to sign up for, that eligibility criteria should be less strict, and that further requirements should be implemented if Comcast is allowed to buy Time Warner Cable.

The amnesty program will make it possible for some families with unpaid bills to get the cheap service. Internet Essentials rejects applicants who have an overdue Comcast bill or unreturned equipment. Comcast isn't entirely getting rid of that policy, but the company said that "customers who have an outstanding bill that is more than one year old" are now eligible for the program. "Comcast will offer amnesty for that debt for the purpose of connecting to Internet Essentials, so long as the customer meets all the other eligibility criteria," Comcast said.

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"Time to sleep"—inside Ukraine. A few new "fans" of Sanya Sotkin have noticed his geolocation faux pas.

A Russian soldier’s bored posts to Instagram from the Russian-Ukrainian frontier apparently show that he was taking "selfies" inside Ukraine on at least two occasions. Posts from June and July, with geotags stored in Instagram’s Photo Map feature, were made just prior to the downing of Malaysian Airlines Flight 17 over Ukraine, apparently by a Russian-built antiaircraft missile.

This isn’t the first social media faux pas by Russian soldiers on the Ukraine border. On previous occasions, Russian soldiers have posted pictures and posts to VKontakte, the Russian social media site, saying they were on their way to or actually in Ukraine. But the posts of Sanya Sotkin, a Russian Army Signal Corps sergeant (based on the insignia on his uniform in many of his self-portraits), included geolocation data that show him within a military vehicle on the Ukrainian side of the border.

For someone who works with communications systems, it’s surprising that Sotkin apparently forgot he had turned Photo Map on. By default, Instagram doesn’t give up location data; as we demonstrated in our network analysis of the application a few weeks ago, Instagram scrubs EXIF data from photos posted from the iPhone and Android Instagram apps. However, if you switch on “Add Photo to Map” while posting an image, it will automatically add all future location data to Instagram’s Photo Map by default.

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A weird place for an SSD. Apacer

PC makers do all kinds of things to save space inside their cases, but this is a new one to us: Apacer is apparently sampling sticks of DDR3 desktop RAM that include slots for M.2 SSD add-in boards and CFast CompactFlash cards, allowing you to mount storage devices directly to your RAM rather than using slots on the motherboard. The slots will still use the SATA III interface to transfer data—they're just mounted to the RAM and they draw power through the RAM slot.

These sticks will support all three lengths of M.2 SSD boards (2242, 2260, and 2280). That's especially useful because, as AnandTech points out, only one mini-ITX desktop motherboard can directly support full-length M.2 boards. Full-length M.2 boards are necessary to accommodate higher storage capacities—currently available drives top out at 512GB, but 1TB drives are on the horizon.

Connectors visible on top of the DIMMs would likely need to be connected to the SATA connectors on your motherboard; unfortunately it doesn't look like these can take advantage of the faster PCI-Express flavor of M.2.

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Shovel Knight is one of the many indie games that came to Nintendo platforms under Adelman's tenure.

Since 2005, Dan Adelman has been the man inside Nintendo most responsible for championing independent games on the company's platforms. And while he says he's leaving Nintendo for a freelance life in independent business development—and doing so on good terms—Adelman appears to have been straining against some of Nintendo's business and marketing decisions for a while.

In a departure post on his website, Adelman says his tenure at Nintendo gave him "one of the best jobs in the best industry," fighting for indie game representation on Nintendo consoles since the days when indie games were barely a thing. He says he's leaving because Nintendo has established new groups devoted to independent game developers.

"People at Nintendo don’t need to be reminded that indie games are important," he writes. "They play them every day. In fact, one of the reasons I decided to leave was that there were fewer and fewer new battles to wage. Everyone was getting on the same page and starting to work together like a well-oiled machine. What fun is getting into an argument if the other person already agrees with you?"

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Sina Weibo

Yep. That's a Samsung phone.

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Photos posted on the Chinese microblogging site Sina Weibo show a new Samsung device said to be the "Galaxy Alpha." The leaker says (through translation) that the device is made of metal with a 4.7-inch screen and a "flagship S5 configuration," which presumably means it has the same specs as the Galaxy S5.

CN.dart.call("xrailTop", {sz:"300x250", kws:["top"], collapse: true});The leaker also says that the back is still removable, and pictures show the typical fingernail slot to peel away the back panel. Presumably the removable back means only the sides are metal, with the back being plastic.

A high-powered 4.7-inch device made out of metal sounds a lot like Samsung's preemptive strike against the iPhone 6, which is rumored to have the same size screen. 4.7 inches would put the Galaxy Alpha at the smaller end of the Samsung spectrum, though the top and bottom bezels means the device itself won't be quite that compact.

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In early July, Intel released two new processors that go by the codename "Devil's Canyon" (DC). You can read our full review, but if you just want the executive summary it's pretty simple. Take the core processor design of Haswell (4th Generation Core Series) and modify the packaging to improve a few areas that will mostly be of interest to overclocking enthusiasts. Specifically, Intel has used a new Thermal Interface Material (NGPTIM) and they've added some capacitors to improve voltage stability/delivery. What does this mean to the layman? For most users, it means a drop in CPU core temperatures of around 10C under load, which can help with noise, cooling, and overclocking as well as improved performance.

There are only two DC CPUs at present, the i5-4690K and the i7-4790K. These are both K-series CPUs, so they're unlocked and target the overclocking enthusiast for a slight price premium, and they supersede the earlier i5-4670K and i7-4770K Haswell parts at similar prices ($5-$10 more). The only noteworthy specification changes: the TDP (Thermal Design Power) has been bumped from 84W to 88W, base/turbo clocks have been increased, and the DC CPUs are the first K-series parts to support VT-d and TSX-NI (mostly useful for workstation/server type environments). In the case of the i5-4690K, the jump in clock speeds is only 100MHz (base and turbo clocks), but the i7-4790K boasts a far more impressive 500MHz increase over the i7-4770K. The new CPUs should work with all 9-series and 8-series chipset motherboards, but 8-series boards will require a BIOS/firmware update so you'll want to verify compatibility before making a purchase.

What this boils down to is how much you want/need to increase CPU performance; you can see the quick summary of performance above. Without overclocking, the i5-4690K is functionally equivalent to the i5-4690 while costing $15 more, so it's almost solely targeted at overclockers. The i7-4790K on the other hand has the highest stock clocks of any CPU Intel has ever released; it's clocked 400Mhz higher than the i7-4790 while costing $25 more. That extra 400MHz translates into a 10-11% improvement in CPU clocks (9% overall performance increase on average), which is quite good all things considered – i7-4770K was only about 7% faster than i7-3770K on average in our testing. Gaming performance, if you're wondering, is largely bottlenecked by GPUs and so any of the CPUs listed above will result in very similar frame rates.

For those interested in overclocking, our internal testing suggests that the new sweet spot for maximum clocks on air/water is going to be around 4.7GHz, which is slightly improved from Haswell where there was more variability. Those chasing extreme overclocks who have already investigated other options for improving overclocking performance (e.g. delidding the CPU package to replace the TIM and integrated heatspreader) will likely find little to no difference between Haswell and DC. Unless you're after the top overclocking spot, DC isn't going to do much for enthusiasts who already own a fast CPU.

Users that aren't looking at overclocking will have an easier choice to make. If you're buying a new system, DC is of course worth considering, and the i7-4970K is the fastest consumer CPU to date. If you're thinking of upgrading, at the top of the product stack the i7-4790K still offers a 9% increase in average CPU performance over i7-4770K and 17% over i7-3770K, which is certainly enough to warrant consideration. But if you're running heavily threaded workloads, you're going to be better off waiting for Haswell-E and X99, which should bring 6-core and 8-core processor's to Intel's Extreme platform next month.

The Department of Transportation is drafting a proposal that could prevent airlines from allowing passengers to make in-flight cell phone calls, The Wall Street Journal reported yesterday.

In-flight calls are not currently allowed, but that could change soon because of a proposal by Federal Communications Commission Chairman Tom Wheeler. The FCC has said its action would be "purely a technical decision" to lift outdated rules that prevent in-flight calling due to concerns about interference with ground-based cellular networks. In other words, the FCC isn't taking a position on whether in-flight calls are desirable. And airlines would still need permission from the Federal Aviation Administration and the DOT to allow them.

DOT Secretary Anthony Foxx said last December that he would consider a ban on calls, and the agency is now close to proposing one. A DOT spokesperson confirmed to the Journal that the agency "is developing 'a notice of proposed rulemaking' for publication in December that would lay out its objections to passengers making and receiving calls. It would open the issue for further comments by industry and travelers until February before making a final ruling. Regulators are focused primarily on the disruptive effects of voice calls rather than... other data use, having last year loosened restrictions that now allow airline passengers to use electronic devices for these purposes from gate to gate."

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When meeting with one of Thermaltake’s main press relations people at Computex, he was keen to show off what he described as ‘his baby’. We reported on the Core V1 at the time – a mini-ITX chassis to incorporate better cooling, quieter cooling, easy maintenance and a good-looking, fast system. Aside from the size, the interchangeable top, bottom and sides of the chassis could be replaced with Perspex side windows to increase the view of the internals, but also the front was fitted with a 200mm fan with space for another 120mm in the rear. The front of the chassis is designed with the fan offset such that longer GPUs can fit inside, up to 250mm.

Much like the full size ATX cases being designed with a warm side/cold side, the V1 uses the same concept but for top and bottom. The top half houses the motherboard, processor and CPU, with space for 140mm of CPU cooler. The bottom half is for storage and the power supply, with space for PSUs up to 180mm in length with another 80mm of cable management space. Thermaltake quote the Core V1 as supporting mounding points for 120mm and 140mm fans on the sides with an additional two 80mm points at the back. Thermaltake point to its Water 3.0 Performer and Pro CLCs as being supported.

The front panel is located on the left hand side, with power/reset buttons, two USB 3.0 ports and audio jacks.

One of the key elements of the Core V1, apart from the design and the visuals, was the price. During Computex I was told that Thermaltake was aiming at a US$50 MSRP, which caught the eye of a number of our readers. The Core V1 is currently listed at Newegg for $49.99, hitting that price right on the nose.

Source: Thermaltake

Gallery: Thermaltake Goes Small: Core V1 mini-ITX Chassis Launched